City of Rapture recreated in Minecraft

A team of Minecraft gamers has recreated a massive amount of BioShock’s city of Rapture. To go with it they have filmed an impressive two-part walkthrough video featuring a number of players posing as Big Daddies, Little Sisters, and memorable characters like Sander Cohen and Dr. Steinman.

This remarkable achievement is the work of Penny Arcade community members who claim to have built the entire city brick-by-brick, without the help of external editors. It incorporates locations conceived by Irrational in the original game as well as newly-designed areas like the “surface recreation dome.”

Recently, we featured another BioShock-themed Minecraft creation: BioShock Infinite’s city of Columbia as built by DrKamina and his team on the City of Rapture server, which has fittingly also made its own version of Rapture. This new Rapture creation was so impressive, we thought it was worth doubling up on Minecraft posts.

I run the server this stuff goes down on. One of my players just let me know you guys featured us here, which makes me giddy like a schoolgirl. We actually have our own version of Columbia, too, but I haven’t had the time to record it yet. Building in the sky is a refreshing change from constantly drowning.

I just want to solidify the claim that the entire city was done by hand. We don’t hand blocks out on the server – we have a giant stripmining operation set up that has slowly eaten a huge portion of our map as we requisition the resources we need for building, and forges are running pretty much 24/7.

The -map itself- has been edited. Columbia and Rapture were projects we started on an older map. When Columbia and Rapture started to become gigantic, we found we were having a big problem – these megacities started to butt up against other people’s work, and things were generally getting crowded. On September 25th, I took it upon myself to make a brand-new map for us to play on, and with the game’s natural map generator, MCEdit, and NBT Forge I crafted a giant field for Columbia and an expansive deep ocean for Rapture. I removed Rapture and Columbia from their original, hand-dug spaces on the old map, and inserted them into the current one after making appropriate room for them. Nothing else from the old map was saved, because most of the players wanted a fresh start.

A bunch of us have thought about inviting the Irrational Games guys on just to hang out and wander around. It seems only fair, after having enjoyed their game so much.

[...] It allows players to make whatever they want, from the Starship Enterprise to a recreation of Rapture from Bioshock. It is in that added possibility space where I gain respect for a game like Minecraft and lose [...]